During the competition, time was of the essence, so I tried several options to speed up my animation render times. First I tried 1 star with smoothing turned on. The quality was not impressive. I tried 2 stars with smoothing turned on. Despite the render speed being better for both 1 star and 2 stars render mode, the render quality was not good enough.

I then discovered that you could reduce the time taken to render an animation that can take 15hours of rendering in 3 star mode to only 3hours! using three star mode.

This was made possible by increasing the animation speed from the default x1 to x5 in thelumion animation speed control. You then, reduce the animation speed to normal in the postprocessing software without a noticeable loss of quality.

WARNING: Do not speed up your animation speed too much in lumion. You will get fuzzy resultswhen you post process to normal. Your camera must not pass too close to objects such as people, cars, and trees.

I recommend to speed up animations in lumion to x 4, and then slowing them down to 25% in your post processing software.

The above tips are only suitable if you have run out of time, but still want decent renders that look far much better than animation renders in 1 or 2 stars.

The method was implemented, in my competition submission entitled "The Waterfall Holiday Place". The clip that introduces the entire development after the waterfall clip was rendered this way. The clip where you are gliding over the roadway from the west fountain to the east fountain was rendered this way too.

Talking about star render modes, are Lumion Team going to implement the intermediate rendermode between 2 and 3 stars which they mentioned some time back?

How much time was then taken to reduce animation speed to normal in your post processing software? Which one did you use?

An originally 15 hour render accelerated to render at X 5 will take 3hours to render in lumion for complex scenes. This will take 5 to 7 minutes to post process to a speed reduced to 25%. Most post processing apps. support slow motion features. The slow motion feature interpolates missing frames to create a smooth animation. You have to experiment with all speeds in lumion to find out what works best for you. A speed of x 10 in lumion will reduce the render time considerably but will not yield you best results after post processing. My recommendation is a speed of x4 or less in lumion.